HELP - Unnatural Link Penalty driving me insane! | Warrior Forum - The #1 Digital Marketing Forum & Marketplace

11 years ago

Removing the penalty can prove to be a real pain in the arse. But try to do that, just so you try to save all the work you`ve put in the website so far.. but get another domain and build a 5 page info website there that promotes your services.. so if you don`t get your penalty removed, you can start with a website that will already have gained some visitors and a month or two in age..

Thanks
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Susan23

11 years ago

Originally Posted by mrgoe

Removing the penalty can prove to be a real pain in the arse. But try to do that, just so you try to save all the work you`ve put in the website so far.. but get another domain and build a 5 page info website there that promotes your services.. so if you don`t get your penalty removed, you can start with a website that will already have gained some visitors and a month or two in age..

Well just starting a new website in itself is hard because we have a very large forum with 400,000 members. So we either need to get this penalty removed or just move the entire site to a new domain. Trying to build a new site and forum and create the same member base would take years. Thanks for your response. :p

The good news is if we do need to move the website we can start with hits by the traffic coming in already and we can get people from our 220,000 FaceBook likes directed to the new site. We could also go back into Pintrest, YouTube, Google+, Twitter, Etc and make the older links start going to the new domain if we do need to move.

I've just seen some posts as I said where people moved to a new domain and started ranking up pretty fast. Again, we are a very large site so this isn't a light decision to be made for us.

Thanks
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MikeFriedman 11 years ago

You are on the right track.

Reconsideration request can take a lot longer than 10 days to hear back from.

You mentioned that you used another SEO company. I would ask them for any logins they can provide on links they built so you can go in and manually remove them. If they were doing a lot of blog commenting type garbage, that won't be possible.

I would also dig into the links a little more. It may not just be sites that are linking to you a lot that are the problem.

I know you have a lot of links, so that will be seriously time consuming.

You won't get a response from 90%+ of the webmasters you try to contact. When an SEO company, and I use that term loosely, is building spammy links, they are most often on sites that are more or less abandoned. You will never get a response.

Disavow tool is your best option at that point.

Whatever you do, if you decide to move the domain to a new domain, do not use a 301 redirect. There are tons of stories out there of penalties like this passing through a redirect.
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gesman

11 years ago

I been in a similar situation with one of my portals within personal development niche.
One day my traffic picture suddenly looked just like yours.

I sent email to Google via webmasters tools regarding possible penalty and actually got reply that my site is "OK" - it is under no violation. Yet site was totally gone from the first page to the 5-th or so.

The Google guy replied with standard bubble regarding quality, unique content but my site already had quality and totally unique content because i wrote it all myself.

First page of google is filled with usual suspects: wikipedia, google images, youtube and few pages belonging to popular media monsters.

Then I decided to do just what you thought about - switched domains.
I copy/pasted contents and hard-redirected oldsite.com/* -> newsite.com/*

It's been 3-4 months and this didn't help at all. Not yet at least.
I suspect someone with power at Google is having conflict of interest in this niche - and hence this happens.

Gleb

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online only

11 years ago

I wanted to chime in and give my personal opinion. Although I have never removed any sort of manual/auto penalty from Google nor do I have received one, but I have read many casestudies on how people managed to get over from them.

First of all, try make yourself clear how many REAL/LEGIT links do you have out of 6000 domains that are pointing to you. Is there more than 200-300 legit links? If the answer is YES then it's probably worth saving or at least trying to save this domain.

If not, I'd dump this one. Let it deindex and move the content/databases/forum to new domain. I would not do any redirect, just let your members know that your site has been moved to another domain.

Try to remove as much as links as possible and make sure you document it. Take at least 1-2 weeks for just removing the bad links, put them all in excel and make them well-organized.

Once you have managed to remove some of the links, update your excel doc and send your reconsider request along with your excel document to webmaster tools. Say that you had no idea about those links since you have never-ever build those. Say that you did your best and spent many many hours to find the links, contacted webmasters and managed to remove some of them.

In this way you show them (google) that you actually put some effort in finding the bad links and removing some of them.

At this point I wouldn't try the disavow tools since I have no trust/believe in such thing, but let it be...

If your reconsideration request fails then you might want to try disavowing all the domains where the "bad" links are coming from.

Bad links for Google are mostly:

blog comments
spammy social bookmarks
wiki links
selfmade web2.0 links
links from private network that has gone "bad"
links from article directories
links from completely irrelevant articles. For example, article is about Honda cars and there's random hyperlink to a wedding site.
etc...

Hope that helps

Thanks

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Susan23

11 years ago

Originally Posted by gesman

I been in a similar situation with one of my portals within personal development niche.
One day my traffic picture suddenly looked just like yours.

I sent email to Google via webmasters tools regarding possible penalty and actually got reply that my site is "OK" - it is under no violation. Yet site was totally gone from the first page to the 5-th or so.

The Google guy replied with standard bubble regarding quality, unique content but my site already had quality and totally unique content because i wrote it all myself.

First page of google is filled with usual suspects: wikipedia, google images, youtube and few pages belonging to popular media monsters.

Then I decided to do just what you thought about - switched domains.
I copy/pasted contents and hard-redirected oldsite.com/* -> newsite.com/*

It's been 3-4 months and this didn't help at all. Not yet at least.
I suspect someone with power at Google is having conflict of interest in this niche - and hence this happens.

Gleb

Hey Gleb,

We think our site has actually been under attack by a competitor site (even tho we can't prove it). The sheer amount of backlinks from bad sites tends to suggest someone has been doing a campaign against us for a long time now. We also have weekly issues with spambots, ddos attacks, hacking and more. So I think someone report us to Google, they checked and we got the manual penalty.

Now I'm just stuck with no traffic, no money coming in and a bad 2 weeks. =(

Originally Posted by MikeFriedman

You are on the right track.

Reconsideration request can take a lot longer than 10 days to hear back from.

You mentioned that you used another SEO company. I would ask them for any logins they can provide on links they built so you can go in and manually remove them. If they were doing a lot of blog commenting type garbage, that won't be possible.

I would also dig into the links a little more. It may not just be sites that are linking to you a lot that are the problem.

I know you have a lot of links, so that will be seriously time consuming.

You won't get a response from 90%+ of the webmasters you try to contact. When an SEO company, and I use that term loosely, is building spammy links, they are most often on sites that are more or less abandoned. You will never get a response.

Disavow tool is your best option at that point.

Whatever you do, if you decide to move the domain to a new domain, do not use a 301 redirect. There are tons of stories out there of penalties like this passing through a redirect.

The older SEO company won't give out any info, they just said they used permanent links and we can't get anything removed.

If we move to a new domain and don't do a 301 redirect what should we do with the older site? IE: We will remove all the content to the new site of course but how should we inform people still looking for and going to the old site? Picture on the main page saying we moved with no forwarding link?

Originally Posted by online only

I wanted to chime in and give my personal opinion. Although I have never removed any sort of manual/auto penalty from Google nor do I have received one, but I have read many casestudies on how people managed to get over from them.

First of all, try make yourself clear how many REAL/LEGIT links do you have out of 6000 domains that are pointing to you. Is there more than 200-300 legit links? If the answer is YES then it's probably worth saving or at least trying to save this domain.

If not, I'd dump this one. Let it deindex and move the content/databases/forum to new domain. I would not do any redirect, just let your members know that your site has been moved to another domain.

Try to remove as much as links as possible and make sure you document it. Take at least 1-2 weeks for just removing the bad links, put them all in excel and make them well-organized.

Once you have managed to remove some of the links, update your excel doc and send your reconsider request along with your excel document to webmaster tools. Say that you had no idea about those links since you have never-ever build those. Say that you did your best and spent many many hours to find the links, contacted webmasters and managed to remove some of them.

At this point I wouldn't try the disavow tools since I have no trust/believe in such thing, but let it be...

If your reconsideration request fails then you might want to try disavowing all the domains where the "bad" links are coming from.

For me bad links are:

blog comments
spammy social bookmarks
wiki links
selfmade web2.0 links
links from private network that has gone "bad"
links from article directories
etc...

Hope that helps

It looks like we only have good links coming from content we created, IE" Youtube, PR articles, Twitter and FaceBook. Most of the other links are from some other forums and user sites, which account for maybe 50 or so backlinks.

Thanks again guys for the comments and help so far.

Thanks

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HN

Banned 11 years ago

If you have 400,000 members why even bother? How about expanding by word of mouth? Shouldn't Google traffic be considered as a bonus anyway?

Thanks
1 reply

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Susan23

11 years ago

Originally Posted by HN

If you have 400,000 members why even bother? How about expanding by word of mouth? Shouldn't Google traffic be considered as a bonus anyway?

So sorry about that, let me fix that statement and say 400K registered users. We only have about 1500 paid members. Getting the users and members came from Google, now with the traffic gone we went from 600 new sign ups a day down to 120.

So at this point I'm really thinking moving to a new domain is best. Still just my opinion and I'm certainly not any type of SEO guru.

Thanks
2 replies

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HN

Banned 11 years ago

Originally Posted by Susan23

So sorry about that, let me fix that statement and say 400K registered users. We only have about 1500 paid members. Getting the users and members came from Google, now with the traffic gone we went from 600 new sign ups a day down to 120.

So at this point I'm really thinking moving to a new domain is best. Still just my opinion and I'm certainly not any type of SEO guru.

It's funny, but I experienced similar drop, the traffic went from 1500 visitors to 300 visitors a day. 80% decline and it happened on August 18. I figured I'll just add a few million new pages and won't think about it too much.

But why move, why not open a new forum in addition to existing one?

Thanks
1 reply

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Susan23

11 years ago

Originally Posted by HN

It's funny, but I experienced similar drop, the traffic went from 1500 visitors to 300 visitors a day. 80% decline and it happened on August 18. I figured I'll just add a few million new pages and won't think about it too much.

But why move, why not open a new forum in addition to existing one?

If you open a new forum and site your looking at having to put in all that content from scratch, if I just move the current one I already have 500,000 posts that will help the new domain start ranking better.

Thanks
1 reply

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PerformanceMan

11 years ago

Originally Posted by Susan23

If you open a new forum and site your looking at having to put in all that content from scratch, if I just move the current one I already have 500,000 posts that will help the new domain start ranking better.

If you redirect the old pages to the new ones, the backlinks will follow - and so will the penalty....

You're in a DIRE situation here...I'm telling you this from personal experience...

You should forget all about 'recovery' from this. With almost one million backlinks, it just ain't gonna happen...

You need to immediately figure out how to make social and paid traffic work for your business model. That will be so much more productive than trying to resurrect a website that has been dinged by Google.

I'm positive this is not what you want to hear, but you're going to have a lot more weeks like the last two before you return to the trend of the past six years - if you ever do, which is extremely doubtful.

Google has adopted a real vindictive attitude in 2013 and what's happened to you is more common than you may realize.

Thanks
2 replies

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gesman

11 years ago

Originally Posted by PerformanceMan

If you redirect the old pages to the new ones, the backlinks will follow - and so will the penalty....

You're in a DIRE situation here...I'm telling you this from personal experience...

You should forget all about 'recovery' from this. With almost one million backlinks, it just ain't gonna happen...

You need to immediately figure out how to make social and paid traffic work for your business model. That will be so much more productive than trying to resurrect a website that has been dinged by Google.

I'm positive this is not what you want to hear, but you're going to have a lot more weeks like the last two before you return to the trend of the past six years - if you ever do, which is extremely doubtful.

Google has adopted a real vindictive attitude in 2013 and what's happened to you is more common than you may realize.

Totally agree with that.
In fact when searching for something on Google - I had to make more effort to find relevant results compare to what was there before.

These $5 a pop indian and pakistani SEO "experts" certainly could point lots of garbage to any site. Google should be smart enough to detect and "disavow" bad links itself.
I would suggest this:

Make sure to have yourself protected from normal daily garbage: spambots (especially active for forums), malware, attacks.
Run dedicated server with CSF properly configured and running.
Do what you did before to serve your visitors.
Hell with Google, it needs to get it's act back together.
Advertising more in relevant places where your potential customers hanging around.

Gleb

Thanks

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Susan23

11 years ago

Originally Posted by PerformanceMan

If you redirect the old pages to the new ones, the backlinks will follow - and so will the penalty....

You're in a DIRE situation here...I'm telling you this from personal experience...

You should forget all about 'recovery' from this. With almost one million backlinks, it just ain't gonna happen...

You need to immediately figure out how to make social and paid traffic work for your business model. That will be so much more productive than trying to resurrect a website that has been dinged by Google.

I'm positive this is not what you want to hear, but you're going to have a lot more weeks like the last two before you return to the trend of the past six years - if you ever do, which is extremely doubtful.

Google has adopted a real vindictive attitude in 2013 and what's happened to you is more common than you may realize.

We don't want to redirect the pages, we want to open a new website and simply put up a one page informative graphic telling them we moved to .net

Originally Posted by gesman

Totally agree with that.
In fact when searching for something on Google - I had to make more effort to find relevant results compare to what was there before.

These $5 a pop indian and pakistani SEO "experts" certainly could point lots of garbage to any site. Google should be smart enough to detect and "disavow" bad links itself.
I would suggest this:

Make sure to have yourself protected from normal daily garbage: spambots (especially active for forums), malware, attacks.
Run dedicated server with CSF properly configured and running.
Do what you did before to serve your visitors.
Hell with Google, it needs to get it's act back together.
Advertising more in relevant places where your potential customers hanging around.

Gleb

We have anti spam code in place that works fine now.
We have dedicated servers with all sites running off different IPs

Thanks
2 replies

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Hossain 11 years ago

Originally Posted by Susan23

We don't want to redirect the pages, we want to open a new website and simply put up a one page informative graphic telling them we moved to .net

Actually this might discourage people to click on the link to visit new .net site. As Mike said not to do 301 redirect you can use JavaScript Timing Events to do a redirect after few seconds of waiting on the old website. Here is a complete code collected from w3schools. Edit it according to your requirements.

setTimeout(function() {
window.location.href = $("a")[0].href;
}, 5000);

For more see JavaScript Timing Events
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PerformanceMan 11 years ago

Originally Posted by Susan23

We don't want to redirect the pages, we want to open a new website and simply put up a one page informative graphic telling them we moved to .net

That's a duplicate version of your website. It will take Google a long time to remove the pages from the old website. You'll have to add a nofollow, noindex tag to all your existing pages - and then WAIT.

Eventually Google might get around to re-ranking the pages on the new domain. You won't have ANY backlinks or trust on the new domain, so it's going to take a long, long time to get anywhere.

This is a long shot at best.

The organic search model has come to an end for your site. You have to replace it immediately with something better.
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MikeFriedman

11 years ago

Originally Posted by Susan23

So sorry about that, let me fix that statement and say 400K registered users. We only have about 1500 paid members. Getting the users and members came from Google, now with the traffic gone we went from 600 new sign ups a day down to 120.

This made me think of another possibility. 400k users is a ton of users. However, you have very few paid members, and my guess is those are the active ones.

Are you having a lot of bots sign up just to drop links in their profiles? If you are having a ton of bots doing that, there could be a ton of bad links outgoing from your site, and Google may have devalued the domain because of that.

Just another possibility.

Thanks
1 reply

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Alexzeto 11 years ago

Here is my advice,

Start All OVer !!!!
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HeadStartSEO

11 years ago

Susan, I'm sorry to hear about your situation. I have a number of clients in similar tough spots and I know how PAINFUL it is to see your business crushed overnight.

The good news is that this will leverage you and your team to start thinking long term. You have two options:

1. Go through all 6000-10000* domains manually and get rid of ANYTHING that appears suspect.
2. Switch to a new domain name, do some link reclamation on your most valuable (non spammy) links, then start from scratch with nothing but white hat goodness.

If you work around the clock, you can get #1 done in 1-2 weeks depending on your experience doing backlink profile QC. I say 10000* because the process usually goes like: export GWT links, OSE links, Ahrefs links, and MajesticSEO Links >> trim to root >> remove duplicates. The final number is usually 1.5-2x higher than the total ref domains in GWT. I would take this approach if I were in your situation.

The second approach is a little safer but certainly more painful in the short term. It's safer because you KNOW that 6 months from now you're back in control of your business, as opposed to being at the whim of more anti-spam updates.

Hope this helps and good luck with the recovery.

Thanks

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RedShifted

11 years ago

Originally Posted by Susan23

Thats a sad image to see. One of my sites lost 60% of its traffic in early august but I didn't receive any unnatural link penalties and we wound up getting most of our traffic back over the next few weeks.

With that said, its a very profitable site, but I wasn't too paranoid either way.

I'm not sure how you operate your business, but in this instance its fairly clear that you had all your eggs in 1 basket. And thats begging for disaster imo.

Literally within 24 hours after I determine a website is profitable, I build a second site in the same exact niche, targeting the same exact keywords, and start SEO'n it. My goal isn't top 3 rankings for these sites, I keep them back on page 2 and if a money site gets taken down, I boost SEO on my secondary sites and create a third backup site.

I have websites in various niches like this, where all the sites have backup sites. And I never switch SEO providers. I just use the same person all the time because he gets the job done everytime.

As terrible as this situation is, I don't think there is a real solution for you. I think realistically speaking, you're ****ed.

Theres no other way to put.

However, I don't see WHY it should take another 2-3 years to gain back the traffic you had before. Granted, your traffic was really good, but 2-3 years to reach that level? I'm not sure what the keywords are, or how many, who your SEO provider is, but I'm confident you could get half that traffic back in a few months if you work smarter than before. You can also build multiple sites that all drive traffic to your main money site. But don't get down on yourself.

This will be a hard learning experience to get through, but in the end if you don't give up, and can adapt, you will be far better off in the end.

I don't think you should stop relying on organic traffic, I just think you need to play the Google game a lot smarter. You need security, damage control, buffer sites, a better SEO provider, better keyword strategy, and pushing other marketing channels a bit harder (maybe youtube and facebook?).

Either way, I feel sorry for you. This is every marketers worse nightmare, but in the end, you may look back and see this as a blessing in disguise.

-RS

Thanks

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yukon

Banned 11 years ago

No way I would ever start a new site to replace the existing site If that's 400,000 legit members.

Maybe leave the old site intact & build 2-3 new sites targeting your highest traffic keywords, then redirect search traffic with a meta redirect (not 301/302 redirect) back to the existing money page on the old site. That way the new site/pages will rank with fresh quality links & you can set the meta redirect timer long enough to let Google crawl the new pages & still redirect search traffic.

That's kinda half azz but I don't see any other option. Moving 400K legit members isn't realistic IMO.

Long term work on correcting the original site link penalty in WMT.

Fire your current SEO provider If they built the junk links.

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Pierre2013

11 years ago

Originally Posted by Susan23

Hey everyone,

This is my first post here and I'm very sorry if any of this has been repeated on the forum. Due to the new Google Hummingbird update and all of you being experts (I hope) on SEO and my problem I wanted to post my own topic on the matter. I hope someone with the proper knowledge has time to respond and help, thank you in advance for any reply.

NOTE: Due to the nature of the website we would rather not list the URL but we can provide any kind of information someone may need beside the URL itself.

The Problem
Last week we got a notification from Google that we had Unnatural links coming to our site and we were put on a site wide restriction until we fixed it, here is the exact message.

Manual Actions
This site may not perform as well in Google results because it appears to be in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines.

Site-wide matches Some manual actions apply to entire site

Reason
Unnatural links to your site
Google has detected a pattern of unnatural artificial, deceptive, or manipulative links pointing to pages on this site. These may be the result of buying links that pass PageRank or participating in link schemes. Learn more.

The Traffic & Money Issue
We use to get great traffic to the website as you can see below, now that the penalty is in place that has gone down to near nothing. Also we were making a good amount of money to support our staff and now that is also almost gone. With this being our ONLY online business (for 6 different families) this is pretty bad.

Currently the only new traffic comes from word of mouth and people who are already registered.

The Directions on HOW to Fix the Problem
I have gone over all the Google webmaster tool guides as well as the Google webmaster forums (where many people were just rude and not very helpful). From everything I looked at, watched, etc it says to remove as many bad links as you can and then disavow the rest while keeping good notes. The problem is it seems the old SEO company we hired built some really bad links and we even think a competitor site has been building links against us as well due to the amount of links built. Our site was so popular before and doing so well we never checked Google Webmaster Tools or thought about the issue until we got the email from Google and the penalty. While I do understand this is rather bad on my part we were always busy with tech support and helping customers. Once we did check our backlinks we found some pretty bad news (see image below).

What Has Been Done?
We looked over the links but with the sheer amount it would take us months to check them all and see what was good and bad. So we narrowed them down by linking domains, checked a few of the given links and marked them as bad if they looked like spam. Many sites link to us 500+ times or more. We actually contacted about 60 sites and never got an answer from anyone. The older SEO company we used said the links were permanent so we used the disavow tool on those domains.

We then sent in a reconsideration request and still have NOT heard back from Google, it's been 10 days *sigh*.

What Should We Do?
So I've been thinking about this a bunch after reading all the current information on the topic. I'm not really sure what to do and wanted some guidance. Should we......

1) Wait to see if Google will clear up and remove the penalty and then see how things go after that?

2) Move the website to a new URL? Right now we have it at _________.net, maybe we could move it to ___________.org or ___________.us? Then if we move it tell people via the older site that we moved? Wouldnt that fix the issue and start us as new?

If moving to a new domain is the answer should we 301 redirect all the older pages and site or should we just put a message on the main domain with a link? This has really been something I cant get a straight answer on so far.

Anyway, thanks for any help you guys can give me, this has given me and lots of other people some pretty bad anxiety over the past two weeks so I hope someone has time to give us a little help. We just want to get back online and get ranking again.

Regards,
Susan23

May be you can try this Thread

Thanks

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TomerN

11 years ago

Your best bet is to start a new website on a new domain and get new backlinks. Sucks, but there really isn't a better option SEO wise.

It's happened to me several times. When Penguin bites, it bites hard :/

Thanks
1 reply

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Racebum 11 years ago

just for the hell of it i left a domain alone that had this happen last year. the main url was banned from google and pr went to 0. all the sub pages still would come up in an exact search but the main url would not. same unnatural link penalty in webmaster tools

anyway

i removed the blogroll and link oriented english on the page, let it sit and the site is now back in google. not really sure how long the penalty was as i didn't keep close tabs on it. was at least 180 days. the site is now a pr0 since we haven't had an update in ages, curious what will happen when we do update.

that all happened with me doing absolutely zero
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HELP - Unnatural Link Penalty driving me insane!

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